In Place
I dreamt I saw you,
expatriate Californian,
who once had a gloss
as clean, complete and isolating
as desert palm fronds’
when the early sun spills
inexhaustible silver down
the narrow channel of each blade—
your face struck cleanly
each day by the sun, new-minted.
Before my dream, you had worn thin enough
to slip backwards into the landscape of my past,
which once was the only imaginable landscape.
And then it became so hard to imagine you,
turning your evenly burnished self
among high-strung girls with umber hair
who talk hunched over. Taking your uncomplicated face
down the dark chasms of cities. Striding the subway cars
in a tempered Western swagger.
I remember that other weather
when it was mine and mine alone.
To go there now would be to enter
a room of transmuting cloud—
to wake to whole skies of cirrus
or cumulus crowding and rolling,
to days of quaking light
and mottled shadows—
the wind churning
flinging and stretching them
and their snapping back—
and not to this unmitigated still sun
and the acute presence
of every articulated palm.
In my dream
you walked towards your steamy house
rosy with the weather,
curls of your straight hair
tender as ferns,
startling and fading
in shadow-stripes of sun,
you climbed the stairs,
and I moved towards you
in my thin shoes,
one arm extended
to brush your grave face—
clear momentarily,
like the blue eye of a cloud.
– judy kronenfeld
"In Place" first appeared in Judy Kronenfeld's Shadow of Wings, Bellflower Press